


Oil of Vitriol

by haemat



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, I'm spreading the good word of "Nott is smart", References to Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 07:39:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15792030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haemat/pseuds/haemat
Summary: Nott is a fast learner, Caleb realizes, but a supremely untalented teacher.He's taught her a few spells, but this one she learned on her own, somehow, without his intervention. And he's asked her to show him how it's done, and he's regretting every moment of it.





	Oil of Vitriol

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place during the Mighty Nein's first stint in Zadash, before first meeting the Gentleman (and thus before the first time Caleb casts Message).

Every night, the hunters go to bed early so they can search for meats early in the morning. Nott's boss is an expert on pain, on functional uses thereof, but he is also an excellent cook, and thus opts to keep similar hours. It's her job, meanwhile, to check the locks on the cages in the covered wagon that functions as the clan's prison each night, which affords her the perfect opportunity.

The prison is only allowed one wagon, so it's important to prioritize prisoners. Those that don't make the cut have their throats cut -- and the rest of them inevitably makes its way into some meal within the following hours.

Nott is not smart enough to be a talented cook, or have any skills in hunting or tracking, or rearing horses to help her nomadic clan travel with their collection of things and people, but she's smart enough to know the perfect time to sneak food into the prison wagon for those that have managed to survive the day. They don't have a lot of prisoners right now, really. Most don't last very long, especially these days. But Nott picks out all the human and halfling meat out of her dinner dutifully each night, and takes what remains to them.

There are two tonight, taking up two of four scavenged cages meant for animals but used for halflings. One has been here for some time, and one is new. The former never takes his meal from her, but she leaves it anyway, setting down a little bit of stew outside his cage. No spoon or fork, because while Nott is hopeful he'll eat, she's practiced enough with him to know she shouldn't risk snatching extra utensils for someone who won't use them. Still, she leaves the bowl there, reasonably sure the only meat in the stew is rabbit this time, and whispers conspiratorially to him.

"I have rabbit stew tonight. You should eat it before I leave, or the boss'll catch you with it, and that would mean you'd get hurt more," she murmurs, practiced lines but the desperation that he'll eat more than the nasty, rotten scraps the prisoners usually get afforded has left her after dealing with enough people like him. People who won't accept help from another rotten goblin, after they've been taken and tortured, after their loved ones have died at the hands of goblins just like her.

She understands. She wouldn't trust her either, but she'd like to think she'd be a slightly smarter one if she were born a halfling. There's no real point to poisoning the prisoners in secret.

But still, the man lies curled up in his cage, facing away, his ratty clothes and his matted dirty blond hair all she can see in the low light of her little candle.

"The same for you, new guy," she says with a sigh, leaving a bowl and a spoon near the new prisoner's cage. He's crouched near the back of it, only one eye visible behind black curls, the other swollen shut. He stares at her for a moment.

Then, silently, he reaches over and snatches the bowl away from her, taking the spoon and scarfing it down, almost goblinlike in his voracity. He looks much nicer, though, than a goblin. Even with the bruised eye. He hasn't been here long enough to start looking nasty the way they all do after a short time with the boss.

He finishes while Nott silently watches, peering at him over her knees even as he keeps his one eye on her all the while, staring at each other silently like they were playing the world's worst poker game.

The first time they meet, the only words Yeza says to Nott, whispered between the bars of his cage like a secret when he hands back his bowl licked clean, are, "The other guy won't eat your gift. He's dead."

Nott doesn't have a response ready for that. She simply says, "Oh." Then, she hands Yeza the dead guy's bowl too.

* * *

Nott is a fast learner, Caleb realizes, but a supremely untalented teacher.

He's taught her a few spells, but this one she learned on her own, somehow, without his intervention. And he's asked her to show him how it's done, and he's regretting every moment of it.

First, Nott pulls out a bunch of copper wire and makes a few false starts, completely confusing him on how exactly he's supposed to follow her movements with it. Then, he says, "Can you show me the somatic portion once more," after she finally demonstrates the spell successfully, and she gives him such a blank look that he can't help but feel disheartened.

Right. She's bad with technicals. She learns by doing. He doesn't know how she manages to do things like mix up chemicals and antitoxins and learn spells he's never learned himself without so much as an understanding of the basic vocabulary behind any of it, none of what he's learned from books and from tutors behind her knowledge, but he already knew that, didn't he? 

After all, he'd asked her once to explain what she was doing as she was burning sulfur and saltpeter, and all she said was, "Well, do you know what an iron is?" At his blank look, before he could say she doesn't have iron in front of her, she continued, "You use it to smooth out your clothes! Anyway, don't try to do that with this. You should be wearing your mask, Caleb." And she demonstrated... covering her nose and mouth with her shirt.

It hardly seemed safe, and so he no longer comes near her once she's taken out her alchemy supplies.

No, Nott has a way of picking apart something in her mind to understand how it works, but not why. She can learn to cast Message out of seemingly nowhere, just based on watching him cast his own spells, without a single book or tutor, but not know what makes the verbal and somatic and material components all work.

So Nott's teaching is very elementary and very... avant-garde. She retries the gestures with the copper wire, holding it up to her mouth.

"So, really, the copper wire represents a connection between you and the other person," she says authoritatively, "and you make a design like you do when you do your spells, only this time it's supposed to be linking the sounds in the air with the person, so to go to you I just think about what it's like for you to hear things in the air around you, and I represent that like this," and she shows him so fast he can only just see what she's doing. "Then, I talk into it, angled towards you."

He hears an echo of her voice a second later, as the Message reaches his ears. Well, she certainly cast it, even if... none of that made any arcane sense.

Caleb tries to translate it into arcane theory in his head, and tries to guide his words to her through his own copper wire, even though she is mere inches away from him. "Is this how you learned how to make acids and antitoxins? Stumbling your way through it with your unique logic?"

Nott pauses, lowering her wire, and he thinks at first she is listening to his Message being repeated, and then she says, "You did the design wrong," and he sighs and tries again.

"You don't have to answer me if you don't want to. I was just curious," he sends through his wire. "You have a strange way of understanding the world that I'm sure I'll never understand."

Nott smiles faintly, but it doesn't look like the excited smile of seeing her student succeed. In fact, it doesn't look that pleased at all.

"I learned how to make some acids from a very good teacher," she says, not looking at his face. "And then I figured others out from there."

She didn't use her wire, but a moment later her voice echoes in his ears. For a moment, Caleb wants to ask how that happened, but then he remembers: the spell includes a single reply. He'd cast it successfully.

"I have no idea why the spell I just cast worked, I hope you realize," Caleb says, placing his hand on her head and ruffling her hair under her hood. Nott's strange almost-smile turns into a grin as she giggles and bats his hand away.

"Magic is very strange," is her response, which is fair enough, he supposes. "So, do you want to terrorize the others with random Messages to practice?"

"I'd really rather not, but I'll do it to solidify my understanding of the spell," Caleb sighs. He then looks at her seriously. "And if they kick us out of the group, I'll only have you to blame."

Nott snickers, catching onto Caleb's odd, deadpan sense of humor. He likes that about her. She understands him in a way others don't.

He thinks he understands her in a similar way. They don't ask anything they wouldn't want to tell, and they... get each other, as people without pasts. It's a fantasy, really, the Caleb that exists when he's with Nott, but he's willing to put up with the lie as long as she's the Nott that she is when she's with him.

And then she ruffles his hair in revenge and he closes his eyes with a long-suffering sigh. He deserved that, probably.

* * *

Nott is a quick learner, but she learns through action, not explanation. She realizes this very soon into her first lesson with Yeza, who she even sooner realized was an extremely intelligent man.

He's calculating in ways most prisoners were not. Most prisoners would give in to hysteria or misery pretty quickly, let their emotions get the best of them, but it was almost like Yeza had prepared to be abducted by goblins. He didn't let Nott's appearance stop him from accepting her help, or even from starting to teach her how to combine ingredients he requested she find for him in secret to make alchemical compounds, and he knew exactly what to say to the boss to keep his life longer and longer than any other prisoner they ever had.

Nott could tell what he was doing, giving little hints and little tells, little insights into the community of Felderwin and when best to strike, convincing enough in his act that the boss couldn't tell he was just trying to stay alive, but could definitely tell it was worthwhile to keep him around.

"Do you know what an ion is?" Yeza had asked her, and she had famously responded, "If I did, my clothes wouldn't be so wrinkled, would they?"

Nott has a smart answer for everything, even if it's to cover up how dumb she feels.

Soon enough, after explaining covalent bonds and being met with a blank face, Yeza had simply given her a grocery list and told her to come back the next night.

" _This is how you make vitriol_ ," Yeza says, in Halfling. He insists on speaking to her in almost entirely Halfling, now, to reinforce his lessons on the language through practice.

"I'm very good at causing vitriol, now please tell me why I had to go through all this effort to steal all this stuff for you," Nott replies, in Common, because the joke makes more sense in Common.

" _It's an acid,_ " he explains, and then continues, " _and also, if someone hears and understands you..._ "

" _I know, I know,_ " she finally says in Halfling.

He shows her how to burn the sulfur and saltpeter with steaming hot water over fire, walking her through it carefully, gently reminding her when she nearly has an accident how to irrigate with water if she gets any on her skin. She does burn herself once and nearly puts her finger in her mouth, before he sharply stops her in too-loud Halfling, leaving her to pour water on her finger while biting her tongue and holding her breath to listen for any curious clan members to come by and inspect the noise.

No one comes. Thank the gods for small mercies.

While she works, he makes quiet conversation in Halfling, and her mind is fighting for what to concentrate on, but she thinks maybe even this is a way of teaching her better. She doesn't know, she's not a teacher or a real alchemist.

" _You never talk about yourself,_ " he comments.

" _I'm very boring. I'm a screwup who can't even be good at being a goblin,_ " Nott says. She sniffs a bit at the burning sulfur over her cloth mask and makes a face.

" _Try not to inhale too much of that._ " Yeza's warned her a few times that they can't really be completely safe while they work, but Nott doesn't really care. Mostly because she doesn't know exactly how dangerous the substances she's working with can be, but still. " _In fact, try to breathe as little as possible._ "

" _Now don't tell me that, I'm not smart enough to remember when to start breathing again,_ " she retorts, and Yeza knows it's not the truth, but a laugh escapes his covered mouth anyway. "Anyway," she almost continues in Common, but then remembers to switch back, " _you talk enough about yourself for the both of us._ "

Yeza doesn't say anything for a moment. " _Not really,_ " is his ultimate answer to that, but at least he clarifies, " _what I do and what I know isn't really talking about me._ "

" _Tell me something you've never told the boss,_ " Nott says, distracted from her work. " _Something that isn't just so he keeps you around another day._ "

Yeza bites his tongue, mulling it over. She can't tell if he's trying really hard to think of something, or if he's just trying to decide if he wants to say it.

Finally, he says, " _Take that away from the heat,_ " and she complies. Maybe she overstepped her boundaries. Maybe she's reading too much into this little supposed friendship she's forged with a man she watches get cut into and interrogated almost daily, silent and wishing she didn't have such good hearing, to catch all the little whimpers, to catch the telltale sniff long afterward that indicates nigh-silent tears.

She'd like to see him, one day, out of chains, without a drop of blood on him, without the dark circles under his eyes and the grime on his face. She worries her boss might decide to take an appendage, one day. He's done it before, to others, but Yeza has proven valuable enough without having to resort to such extremes. So far.

Nott doesn't want to see him marred beyond repair, not her very first friend in all her life.

She realizes he already is when he answers her question. " _I'm a supremely selfish person,_ " he whispers, " _who is willing to let Felderwin burn if it means I can see my family again. That is all you need to know about me._ "

"Yeza," Nott says, quiet, and he snaps and points her attention back to the compound she's made, in a little vial. It only took four tries and two burns and one coughing fit.

" _Oil of vitriol,_ " Yeza says, then repeats in Common so she knows the name in both languages. " _It's how you're going to get us out of here._ "

* * *

"Beau, if you can hear this, meow twice. You can reply to this message," Nott whispers into her wire. She grins at Caleb. "Now you try."

"...Beauregard, please ignore that message," Caleb says patiently into his wire. "But please do respond."

The reply comes quickly, to both of them. "If you don't stop fucking magically spamming me, I'm going to choke you both with that wire!" The threat is punctuated with the telltale sound of a long, wooden pole colliding with the wall adjoining their rooms in the Leaky Tap.

Nott bites her lip and turns to Caleb with wide eyes. "Do you think she's serious?"

Caleb shrugs. "Only one way to find out."

Nott considers this, perhaps weighing her continued life against the thrill of continuing to prank the members of their little group. He wonders if Nott is playing the fool or she just genuinely doesn't understand that Beau is speaking out of anger and most likely wouldn't murder them for a joke. She's intelligent, sure, but she displays a complete lack of understanding when it comes to other people.

It's no wonder, really, when he stops to think about it. Nott likely never had anyone willing to give her the time of day before he stumbled across her, from the way she fears everyone around her. She's so utterly used to being singled out and harmed for an accident of her birth, she could hardly believe him when he'd approached her in that prison cell all those weeks ago. She'd brought it up only once, in the cell. Asked him why he didn't fear her.

Caleb only said he knew he had nothing to fear. She accepted that answer, a bit warily, and he's considered that maybe she made the mistake of presuming he overestimated his ability to fight back should a terrifying goblin turn on him.

She probably doesn't think that anymore. Caleb thinks she understands a little better that, back then, he was so close to wasting away that he knew fighting for his life one last time was probably an inevitability. He'd accept it, if she turned on him then.

Caleb also doesn't think that anymore, as he jokes with her in their room in the Leaky Tap, as she teaches him how to send a Message through a wire by demonstrating.

"Let's not talk to Beau anymore, just to be safe," Nott finally concludes.

"If only we had that luxury," Caleb says quickly, after one last thud of her staff against the wall. Nott giggles behind her hands.

"Send one to Jester instead," Nott says.

" _Hallo_ , ah, Jester," he starts, quickly running out of steam for ideas of what to say, "sorry we made your roommate attack the wall." Nott gives him a gesture to go on, raising her eyebrows meaningfully. "...Please reply to this message."

"Caleb!" comes Jester's quick reply. "I was so worried you'd forgotten about me, after all you were having so much fun with Beau and I was getting kind of jealous you know, and I know Nott is with you, oh you should tell her hi, also Beau is getting really mad because she was trying to sleep I think, but I stay up pretty late every night, anyway if you send her another message make sure to--"

Caleb feels like he has to take a deep breath for her after all that. He didn't realize you could stretch the limits of a single reply so far until the magic just gave up on you.

"What did Jester say?" Nott asks, laying on her stomach on the bed and propping her chin up on her hands.

"She told me to say hi to you," Caleb says, not even attempting to extrapolate a message from the rest of the rambling response she'd sent to him.

"Tell her hi back!"

Caleb, for a moment, sees himself in a vision of the future, as an intermediary for Nott and Jester's inevitably ridiculous late night conversation, closes his eyes and instead says, "I'm going to sleep." Nott gives him a very disappointed look, and he tries to ignore the thought that she looks very much like a sad cat, with those large, yellow eyes of hers. He reminds himself it's not worth it. He distracts her in a way he knows works, patting her head and saying, "Thank you, Nott. I understand the spell now."

The affection brings darker greenness to her cheeks, and she beams at him. "I knew you'd get it, Caleb. You're so smart."

"...Get some sleep, Nott." Caleb snaps Frumpkin into existence rather than ruminate too much on the discomfort at her praise, and lets the cat curl up on the bed with Nott as a calming distraction from the energy he'd unintentionally worked up in her after he requested she stay up to teach him.

Caleb lets himself concentrate on the sound of Frumpkin purring and the hope that Nott isn't particularly in the mood for a midnight snack as he falls asleep.


End file.
